I was born in the year of the cop-out, double speak, dust bunny, group think, fairness doctrine, junk food, mass-market, neoconservative, split decision, swing state, tax shelter and wrongful death, among others. Don’t believe me? The Thesaurus offers the fun opportunity to enter your birth year and be presented with all the words that were first used in print that year. Oh, I forgot, kvell was amongst them, the yiddish term for being extraordinarily proud of something. The word is derived from the German word “Quelle,” a source of water erupting. Kvell’s counterpart is kvetch, habitually complaining, as I am known to do. It is derived from the German word “quetschen,” to squeeze to the point of pain. This as an entry, you guessed it, to another round of griping while reveling in the inventiveness of the German/Yiddish language. (Patience, we get to politics in a minute…)
Thinking of words was triggered by reading about the numerous phrases that German holds for pedantry or nit picking. Pea counters (Erbsenzähler) is among them, as is Korinthenkacker (‘currant crapper’) and Paragraphenreiter, which means ‘paragraph rider,’ related to the ways laws are numbered (§), laws that you insist on while doing it by the book, context be damned. Of course, pedantry about applying the law only occurs if it suits those who dispense it.
Take Germany, for example, and consider how unevenly justice was meted out for individuals and corporations that engaged in profiteering during the Nazi era. A new book by investigative journalist David de Jong, Nazi Billionaires, explores the ways how fortunes were made by German tycoons working within the Third Reich’s business and industrial structures. Already rich industrialists (with the exception of the founders of Porsche cars who started poor) profited from the production of weapons (forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles.) Then, with the introduction of the Nürnberg Race Laws, they disenfranchised and eventually expropriated Jewish businesses. Robbery and theft of business assets continued once foreign territories were occupied in those countries.
By 1941, they also used “forced slave labor from mass deportations of people from European countries and Russia, some 12 – 20 million people of whom more than 2.5 million died from horrific working conditions in factories, mines and work camps.” Besides deportations and prisoners of war, concentration camps provided slave labor for private companies, a collaboration of the SS with big companies like BMW, Daimler, Volkswagen, IG Farben, Siemens, Krupp, Dr. Oetker, and companies controlled by Günther Quandt and Friedrich Flick.(Ref.)
What happened to the these corporate perpetrators of crimes against humanity after the war? The book explores how only three trials were held, bringing Friedrich Flick and his managers, Alfred Krupp and his managers, and the entire executive board of IG Farben to justice. All other trials were canceled by the Americans, because they had policy interests that trumped justice. “The Americans limited the number of trials against industrialists because they didn’t want to put capitalism on trial. At that time, the Cold War was getting started, and the Americans made this policy decision where they wanted to rebuild West Germany as a democratically viable and economically strong state, which would act as a buffer against the Soviet Union and the encroachment of communism.”
So people were not dragged into court, were allowed to keep their assets (in the West) to stabilize the newly created republic, and never had to admit to culpability or take responsibility for their crimes. Historians believe that to be true for hundreds of thousands of people who escaped de-nazification under the sheltering embrace of the American occupying forces. Nowadays, some rich families do damage control (some billionaires give away money to relevant charities) often after public outcry. Others create foundations that investigate issues associated with macro-violence, or even recompense forced laborers directly, out of moral obligation, like the heir to the Reemtsma fortunes, fortunes which were partially derived from using slave labor in their factories. Before it went public at the stock exchange last September, Porsche, as another example, tried to remedy parts of its history by negotiations with the heirs of Adolf Rosenberger, the company’s cofounder, who was pushed out of Porsche in 1935 and erased from Porsche company history for being Jewish. But these are drops in the bucket compared to the overall numbers.
I wonder, of course, how much the dispensation of justice – or absence thereof – via the legal system, criminal courts, impeachment trials, ethics commissions and so on is guided by the very same mechanisms right here and now in the U.S. Putting our trust into the likes of the Muellers, Garlands, Smiths of the world might be naive in light of historical precedents that showed nations willing to sacrifice justice on the altar of economic and political imperatives. With the arrival of the 118th house of representatives and their interest in protecting the monied elites we will not even be able to hope for justice. As I write this, the Trump Org CFO Weisselberg was sentenced to five months jail for 15 years of tax fraud, in exchange for a guilty plea and testimony that concerned the Trump organization, but did not flip on Trump personally. The original charges implied a prison sentence up to 25 years. On a five month sentence, he’ll serve approximately 100 days. Compare that to a typical NYC public defense case where people are sentenced to 3-6 years (and will serve 1500+ days) for stealing a jacket. Justice?
70 years after the words first appeared in print, tax shelter, cop-out, double speak and fairness doctrine are as relevant concepts as ever. And now I go and chase dust bunnies.
It was not only industrialists who turned Nazi collaborators. So did the musical world overnight. Here is a Deutsche Welle documentary film (translated into English) that looks at some aspects of music in that era, including how it saved the lives of camp inmates.
Random chain of thought on language and politics while I was watching my beloved crows and their babies.
We have a phrase in our household, disaster crow, that loosely refers to someone who attracts accidents or is otherwise stricken by bad luck. The original German was Unglücksrabe, a raven, not a crow. It is well integrated into the German vernacular and originated with a poem, Hans Huckebein, der Unglücksrabe, about a raven who was brought home from the woods by a boy, only to wreck havoc on a household with mean spirited and sinister raven intentions, ultimately hanging himself in a ball of yarn he tried to destroy. All this in a classic poem by writer and famous satirist Wilhem Busch, whose dark, dark stories, often cruel and vile with punitive death at the end, amused generations of Germans, since the lat 1800s.
Young as well as old readers reveled in the mischievous (mis)deeds of various protagonists depicted in early comic strips, almost, the most famous of them Max and Moritz, and rejoiced at their fitting ending, less of a parable than a sadistic lay-out of consequences. What went unmentioned is the in-your-face expressed anti-Semitism, both in Busch’s poetry and his letters. It was only in 1961 and only for some publishing houses that they simply removed the worst stanzas from whole poems, as if they didn’t exist. (I will not give the garbage room, but my German readers can see for themselves in a smart review in the Jüdische Allgemeine.) The public discussions around Busch’s centennial birthday tried their hardest to minimize, often by adding that he attacked others as well, the catholic church included. The desire to revel in texts that celebrate the misfortune of others seems too strong to be abandoned… Schadenfreude as a national pastime.
However, it also serves to extend latent anti-Semitic ideas in a population that was raised on these stories – and we have ample evidence that anti-Semitism is alive and well. Just this week unknown perpetrators cut down 7 trees planted in memory of the victims of Nazi euthanasia programs and forced death marches, kids among them, at the concentration camp Buchenwald in Weimar. Closer to (now) home, Jewish parents were confronted with the new logo of a Georgia school district:
Distribution is now halted, but anti-Semitic incidents in Georgia have more than doubled between 2020 and 2021, according to a report by the Anti-Defamation League. (Ref.)
And just in case it is seen as isolated incidents: last week every single Republican House member voted against a Neo-Nazi probe of the military and law enforcement. )The amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act did pass with the votes of the House Democrats. All they wanted was for the FBI to report the total number of people who were discharged from the military or police because of their links to or support for far-right extremism .)
In any event, what I was really thinking about before getting side lined by politics, was how frequently phrases pick up bird characteristics or are associated with birds in one fashion or another. That’s true for English as well as German.
Here are some: Crazy as a loon (haunting cry), happy as a lark (melodious songs), skinny as a rail (they hide among the reeds in camouflage), like water off a duck’s back (their uropygial glands coat their feathers,) take someone under your wing (fledglings), ugly duckling (before you develop plumage…), night owl, eat like a bird (small quantities,)eagle eye (superior vision, ability to detect prey), birds of a feather flock together, scarce as a hen’s teeth, proud as a peacock, graceful as a swan, dead as a dodo, free as a bird, as a duck to water and, of course, straight as the crow flies. (I found these here; more complicated bits about words associated with birds can be found in Merriam-Webster.)
For an endless list of the equivalent German expressions you can go here. Notable that bad parenting is called having raven parents, funny or unlucky people are called Spassvogel and Pechvogel, respectively. Instead of picking a bone you pluck a chicken, Hühnchen rupfen, and considering someone stupid or mistaken is expressed as “you have a chickadee,” du hast ‘ne Meise, or “you’re obviously chirping”, bei dir piept’s wohl.
Yes, I know, I’m chirping a lot…
Spatzenhirn (sparrow brain), Gänsehaut (goose bumps,) Hühneraugen (corn on the feet/ chicken eyes, literally), Krähenfüsse (crows’ feet in the face) are also known attributes of this writer. A komischer Kauz (weird screech owl) or odd character, after all.
Oh, I revel in applied language. One of my favorites in this context is the German invention of the phrase Nachtijall, ick hör Dir trapsen, a Berlin idiom that is grammatically false. Literally translated it says, nightingale, I hear your heavy footsteps, (an absurd assertion) but the meaning implies something along the lines of being able to tell which way the wind is blowing. Living language blended two lines from a famous song from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, about hearing and seeing a nightingale, creating a whole new meaning with a joke.
Then again, maybe we should stick to the short vocabulary of this crow: woo or wow? Click on this link!
Here is the song about the nightingale from Des Knaben Wunderhorn set to music by Mendelsohn.
Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte deutsche Lieder (German; “The boy’s magic horn: old German songs”) is a collection of German folk poems and songs edited by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, and published in Heidelberg, Baden. The book was published in three editions: the first in 1805 followed by two more volumes in 1808.
The collection of love, soldiers, wandering, and children’s songs was an important source of idealized folklore in the Romantic nationalism of the 19th century. Des Knaben Wunderhorn became widely popular across the German-speaking world; Goethe, one of the most influential writers of the time, declared that Des Knaben Wunderhorn “has its place in every household”.
And why stop with avian attribution? Here is your poetry fix for the weekend.
It will come as no surprise to you that I am hooked on word games like the NYT’s Spelling Bee and Wordle. The newest one that I can highly recommend – an exercise in finding synonyms – is called Wordy Bird. Try it and rip your hair out.
Today is all about words, then. Words (and phrases) photographed across years, usable as guides to deal with stressors of the moment. For balanced reporting, however, today is also about numbers. Go figure.
Words by clever wordsmiths can be found beyond shop boards….
Take these, for example, attributed to Lewis Carroll.
A Square Poem.
I often wondered when I cursed, Often feared where I would be— Wondered where she’d yield her love, When I yield, so will she. I would her will be pitied! Cursed be love! She pitied me …
Read the lines in the normal way, then read it in columns – either way, it reads the same! words, with some quick math thrown in!
A dozen, a gross, and a score, Plus 3 times the square root of 4, Divided by 7, Plus 5 times 11, Is 9 squared, and not a bit more.
This Limerick is believed to have been written by British mathematician Leigh Mercer, known for inventing the famous palindrome “a man, a plan, a canal—Panama!” in 1948.
Tired?Stand here and activate your super powers
And then there is Miles Kington, who got away with two lines, making my morning:
A Scottish Lowlands Holiday
In Ayrshire hill areas, a cruise, eh, lass? Inertia, hilarious, accrues, helas!
This is a holorime, where both the last syllable of a pair of lines of verse rhyme with one another, as do the entire lines themselves. Best read out loud.
Finally we get to this: for some unrelated reason I slogged through a scientific article on word prevalence norms – i.e. how many people know the meaning of a given word. 5 million pages and a headache later I learned that more men know the words on the left hand of the table, more women the ones on the right. Surprise!
Ofcourse, you could have asked your grandma. She would have been perfectly able to predict and verify the statistical pattern… Do we really need the scientific seal on this kind of common cultural knowledge? Of course we weren’t taught words that did not pertain to our spheres, still rigidly divided by gender in so many areas.
One of my favorite neighborhood signs of all times in Hamburg a decade ago: Nothing works here (In German that has more than practical implications)
Hope the music delivers free happy for the weekend with every word and/or number.
None to be found, neither witches, nor butter. Hope defied, again!
Well, it was a trail name, referring to an orange-colored jelly-like fungus that is parasitic on fungi that inhabit decayed logs. (Tremella mesenterica.) That fungus did not make an appearance on my last hike either, but many other beautiful things did during my first excursion to Chehalem Ridge Nature Park.
The 1260 acres park opened a few months ago about 40 minutes southwest of Portland, near Cornelius. The land had been subject to housing developments before the market crashed. Then Metro stepped in in 2010 and purchased the land from a lumber company, with funds coming from the Trust for Public Land, the $6.1 million its largest acquisition. Since then smaller adjacent properties have been added.
Over the last 6 years the park was developed in earnest, by down-cutting the Stinson Lumber’s monoculture of fir trees where possible, planting native shrubbery and conifers, and giving remaining old growth of oaks, cedars and madrona trees room to breathe.
There is a 10+ mile system of trails, some wheelchair accessible, that is shared by hikers, horse riders and bikers in some places.
The parking lot has functional buildings and covered picnic areas, tons of space for kids to romp around. Pets are not allowed in the park, though, to protect sensitive wildlife.
Trails are clearly marked, and in the more crowded areas at the beginning there are plenty of benches so people can rest when needed.
Several view points offer stunning views of the coast range mountain and the Tualatin valley stretching out into the misty clouds.
Many of the trail names come from the Atfalati language, spoken by the Northern Kalapuyas, a tribe among the many that suffered a horrific fate when the colonialists arrived. With the settlers came the diseases. Malaria, transmitted by mosquitos, the potential vector Anophelesfreeborni common in western Oregon until the early 1900s, was brought to Ft Vancouver by traders and spread from there. It reduced the tribal populations in the valley within three years, 1830 – 1833, by 80% (!), an apocalyptic loss. It hit the White settlers as well, but they knew to treat it with Quinine and had the remedy available, if in limited quantities.
“Cumulative evidence suggests that cultural unfamiliarity with the new diseases—that is, people did not know how to treat them—and the lack of effective medicines may have been as or more important than biological resistance, genetic or acquired, in accounting for the high mortalities. The loss of population resulted in abandoned and consolidated villages, the breakdown of social and political structures, and the loss of cumulated knowledge possessed by specialists (in a culture without written records), making the epidemics cultural as well as biological disasters.” (Ref.)
The Kalapuyans lived in tribal territories containing numbers of related and like-speaking, but basically autonomous villages. They were extremely versed in ecological management, treating the land for 4000 years with controlled, low intensity fires in the fall to create open oak savannahs and mixed forest growth.
This maximized the landscape for the products they needed most – seed, textiles, wapato, and forage for game.
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In addition to the wood land trail, I hiked the short side trails of ammefu, which means ‘mountain’ in Atfalati, ayeekwa referring to bobcats,
Bobcat or coyote scat?
and mampał, which means lake and could be a reference to Wapato lake, currently under restoration for a national wild life refuge after having been converted to onion fields by farmers.
Despite the January date, spring was in the air. It must have been the light green, bordering on chartreuse, everywhere. The forest floors covered with the invasive shining geranium,
the moss carpeting stumps, trunks and branches of the trees,
the first leaves of foxgloves, grass, lupines and even some fresh life among the Great Mullein.
The park also seems a magnet for piles. Piles from reforestation
piles from land management
piles from lunch
piles after lunch.
There is so much to appreciate in the land known as the Outside Place (Chehalem) by the Atfalati people. It speaks to the tenacity of life, even under hard conditions.
And if you are lucky you get to walk for a while behind goldilocks, who appreciated her Dad’s lesson on hibernation as much as I did. So much to learn, everywhere you turn. You just have to show up!
More vicarious walks for you all will be in the offing!
In the meantime here is an old Kalapuya prophecy, translated in 1945 by Melville Jacobs.
Long ago the people used to say that one great shaman in his dream had seen all the land black in his dream.
That is what he told the people. “this earth was all black (in my dream).”
He saw it in a dream at night. Just what was likely to be he did not know.
And then (later on) the rest of the people saw the whites plough up the ground
Now then they say, “that must have been what it was that the shaman saw long ago in his sleep.”
And here is a musical depiction of forest moods from a different continent….
You get a reprieve, dear reader. In my ongoing quest to figure out how the mind works, I was going to write about new theories of consciousness proposed by neuroscientist Anil Seth. His work is the most recent iteration of figuring out the mind/body problem. He discusses the fact that what we perceive consciously is both informative – that one given experience is different from everything else you ever have or ever will perceive – and integrated, every aspect of perception is tied into a whole in fundamental ways. He also has become known for his claim that our brains in some way hallucinate our conscious reality.
But then I thought,”Nah, it’s Friday, let’s do something less demanding. If they want to read up on it, a good intro can be found here.” Let’s just cite one bit since it relates to some of the motivation behind my montage work, which often attempts to take one perception and create one of the many possible alternatives.
“Each (conscious experience) rules out the occurrence of a very, very large repertoire of alternative possible conscious experiences. It’s the reduction of uncertainty among a repertoire of alternative possibilities.“
I guess art is then the search through the repertoire of alternative possibilities….
On to something more entertaining – with montages that were chosen today as a counterweight to the words below: pumpkins bringing color and light to words describing darkness.
What words do we know about the fading or absence of light? Isn’t that question perfect for a stygian, rainy weekend? Stygian, you know, extremely dark, gloomy, or forbidding? From the river Styx where souls are ferried to the underworld? Well, this English-as-a-second language writer hadn’t heard of it either. (I found all of them in the Merriam Webster dictionary.)
I did know umbra, though, from the Latin word for shadow. Not versed in its many variations, however. Adumbrate (to foreshadow; to suggest; to obscure,) inumbrate (to put in shadow,)sombra (the shady side of a bullfight arena – tickets cost more?)burnt umber (a dark brown color,) umbrage (shade; suspicion; resentment,) and last but not least umbrella (device for protecting from rain.)
Next we have tenebrous which means “shut off from the light,” a synonym of dark or murky. Which leads to feeling somber, (gloomy, sullen, melancholy, or dejected in appearance or mood.)
There is caliginous (misty, dark,) and its cousins fuliginous (dark, having the color of soot,) and carbonous (“brittle and dark or almost black in color.”)
Maybe we should focus on crepuscule, a fancy word for twilight or gloaming which is a synonym of “twilight” or “dusk.” There’s at least a smidgen of light still there. And gloaming comes from the Old English word “glōm,” which is akin to “glōwan,” meaning “to glow,” which is what my patient pumpkins try to do in their new visual roles. May they bring cheer!
Music: Liszt’s Nuages Gris (Grey clouds) seem the right fit, in original piano score and then a version for guitar which is actually interesting. And when you’re done with everything else, go out and pick some pumpkins! Just don’t wait until it gets dark….
That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou seest the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away, Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest. In me thou seest the glowing of such fire That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, As the death-bed whereon it must expire, Consum’d by that which it was nourished by. This thou perceiv’st which makes thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
Is there such a thing as melancholy goosebumps? I’d wager yes, when judging my reactions to this sonnet set in fall. They prompted a quick turn-around to the glorious colors found on quotidian walks last week, promising that in every season there is radiance, whether we have to leave it behind or not.
The real reason I was thinking of Shakespeare, though, came from a mind boggling linguistic analysis of another of his creations that is giving us more than goosebumps, instead creeping us out: Macbeth.
Researchers set out to find the source of the fact that actors and audiences alike find the language of the play unsettling, in addition to the horrors unraveling in the plot, or the horrors imposed on us by thinking through the psychology of the main protagonists.
“Actors and critics have long remarked that when you read Macbeth out loud, it feels like your voice and mouth and brain are doing something ever so slightly wrong. There’s something subconsciously off about the sound of the play, and it spooks people. It’s as if Shakespeare somehow wove a tiny bit of creepiness into every single line. The literary scholar George Walton Williams described the “continuous sense of menace” and “horror” that pervades even seemingly innocuous scenes.”(Ref.)
They looked at the rhythm of the words spoken, some jarring ones like the witches’ spells. They looked at the frequent repetitions of phrases, moving from one set of characters to the next. And they counted words and the frequency of their use.
Some results of the statistical word count were unsurprising – yes there are creepy words galore, like “knock”, “cauldron”, “tyrant”, “weird”, “trouble”, “dagger”, “fear”, and “horror”.
Astonishingly, though, there was also an unusually high frequency of the simple word “the.” So they went back and read the play to see where it appeared when unexpected.
Consider the lines, spoken by Lady Macbeth when she is already nervous and distraught:
“It was the owl that shriek’d, the fatal bellman, which gives the sterns’t good night..”
The owl? Not an owl, which would be normal phrasing if we hear such creature in the night? Do we know which owl she’s talking about, since she assumes our familiarity with “the” owl? Something is off here; is she referring to a real thing or the proverbial idea of that messenger?
Many of those examples can be found throughout the text, and they transfer the play’s theme of equivocation – one of the reasons why it is not just a tragedy but something more akin to horror – onto the audience. “The Scottish Play” – how people who fear they might be cursed when performing, refer to it, is not just a horror play because of its body count (although if you consider, there are so many deaths caused directly or indirectly by the protagonist.) It’s not the horror of a good man corrupted into nihilism by a lust for power in front of our very eyes, or the fateful demise induced by guilt of those who share his lust for power. It is not the supernatural horror, potentially induced by real witches or real ghosts and other apparitions. It is the psychological equivocation of what is real and what might be hallucinated, what was truly prophesied or self-enacted by way of (mis)interpretation of the witches chant. It is about losing one’s mind, the greatest horror imaginable.
So much ambiguity, so much fear induced by not knowing the nature of it all. The equivocation was likely enforced by a raging debate in 1606 about the nature of witches. Shakespeare might have likely read the Discovery of Witchcraft published by Reginald Scott in 1584, arguing that it was all a hoax, contradicting royal beliefs of the times that witches were real and to be persecuted.
This ambiguity is now extended to the audience, when subtle use of words like “the” which signal that we should be familiar with the item mentioned – are we? Why would we be? Do we know ourselves or have we missed something? Uncertainty hinted at, established. Disquieting creepiness ensues. (More examples can be found here where I was alerted to all this in the first place.)
Clever, clever. Back in goosebump land, however.
Below are some stunning performances of the play.
Music is – one of my favorite of all times – Verdi’s Macbeth.
Today I’ll attempt to come to terms with some terms ascribed to me by self and/or others. Too frequently these days, I might add. I’ll juxtapose them with photographs that take the wind out of all their negativity – no-one can remain a killjoy, a fussbudget, a crosspatch or a grouch when looking at these visions of new life.
Killjoy (Do you have to write about depressing topics when all we want is some pleasurable distraction???) is an interesting word from the class of cutthroat compounds. These words describe the actions of people or name what things do. The verb is usually on the left (at least in English and German, not so in the romanic languages.) You can surely come up with a lot of these, like pickpocket, daredevil, know-nothing, tattletale, scarecrow or passport. Did I say a lot? There are almost 1300 of them (find the compilation here,) with the very first one documented as early as the 11th century. Sort of practical: instead of thinking of me as “one that inspires gloom or counteracts joy or high spirits : one that tends to pessimism or a depressing solemnness especially among people that are happy or optimistic : one that dispirits” (as Merriam Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary puts it) I just get called out:” KILLJOY!”
Fussbudget (Do you have to complain about half-raw green beans, when I prepare every meal and like my beans crisp? – Oh, my Beloved has every right to say that!) describes a person who, according to the Cambridge dictionary, is often notsatisfiedandcomplains about things that are notimportant. Etymologists believe that the words comprising this compound came from fuss, a state of agitation turning to complaint, and budget, from the old French bougette, diminutive of bouge (bag), from Latin bulga (bag). Luckily, the associated words of finicky, pedantic, perfectionist or purist do not apply to me. I think.
Crosspatch (Do you have to shout? I know you’re irritable, understandably so, but please lower your voice.) is a being who makes an appearance in this household when the going gets rough. The word describes an ill-tempered person, who is cross at the state of affairs, but also makes a fool of herself… patch is believed to have its etymological roots in Italian, where paccio refers to fool. Another possible linguistic root might be the name of Henry VIII’s jester, a man named Patch. Apparently the word took flight in the 1500s, during his time. Fool I am, since every shout these days elicits coughing fits rather than a relief of tensions.
Which leaves us with a grouch, which I am not! A habitually irritable person, as the dictionary defines them, is not found on these premises. Just the occasionally grouchy one, as when taking these photographs this weekend, my first trip to the nature preserve since the surgeries. It was so unexpectedly cold and I so underdressed that I had to get back to the car after a scant 15 minutes. I was swiftly pushed out of that mood when looking at nature’s gift: the renewal of the life cycle as evidenced by goslings all around you. A miracle, each and every year.
Here is music that fits well with being in a bad mood – echoing it (the Allegro) and then helping you beyond (the rest). The full version of Shostakovich’s 10th symphony here.
“”Silence is the real crime against humanity.” – Nadezha Mandelstam
Two nights ago there was a lot of wind and rain. I do not remember that a storm was announced, but by the next morning trees and branches were all over the place, ripped out of the earth or from their trunks. I had to remind myself that nature is served by an occasional house cleaning, rather than thinking, man, it all comes crashing down.
And since language was on my mind, given this week’s focus, I was saddened by another kind of crash: apparently so many Native American Elders are felled by Covid-19, some the sole bearers of languages at the brink of extinction, that a true cultural crisis unfolds. The few who remember the languages, gone.
I decided that we need some real cheer to counterbalance the ominous thoughts. Something that reminds us that even in the middle of catastrophe or the ramp leading up to it, there are glimpses of hope. And courage. And love!
What better than a love poem written by Osip Mandelstam (1891- 1938) for his wife Nadezha, before Stalin managed to finish him off by sending him to a Siberian Labor Camp for his outspoken criticism of totalitarianism?
Nadezha Mandelstam (1899 – 1980) was an unusually strong person, who escaped Stalin’s henchmen by luck and led a quasi-nomadic existence for many years, crashing with friends, doing odds-and-ends jobs, learning her husband’s poems by heart so that they would be preserved, and smuggling copies of them out of the country. She was said to have had a Homeric memorythat allowed her to memorize both original poems and some of their variants. Later she pushed for publication of his collected works, both in the West and later in Russia. Her own memoirs, Hope against Hope and Hope Abandoned (both finished in 1970) are a worthwhile read if you can stomach eyewitness testimony of the Stalinist purges.
Note the crack in the ground with the roots trying to lift up
She remembered his language, ensuring survival of some of Russia’s most important poetry of the 20th century. He was ripped from her side because of his relentless willingness to open his mouth. And yet she insisted: “Silence is the real crime against humanity.”
Let’s hear it for love.
This
This is what I most want unpursued, alone to reach beyond the light that I am furthest from.
And for you to shine there- no other happiness- and learn, from starlight, what its fire might suggest.
A star burns as a star, light becomes light, because our murmuring strengthens us, and warms the night.
And I want to say to you my little one, whispering, I can only lift you towards the light by means of this babbling.
By Osip Mandelstam
Anyone “babbling” to me like this – I promise eternal devotion……
Music is by one of their contemporaries, Scriabin, in a smooth if theatrical rendition of his Fantasy #2. And here is Horowitz, with a different take on a different piece.
And since you’ve followed me through a week with long and complicated topics, here is a bonus bit of cheerful language (and genuine loving sentiment) from a few days ago:
Words fail. Well, they fail me, which is why today you are getting smarter, more experienced and reflective words from someone else. They sure are a wake-up call. (Which is why you also get not my own, but Associated Press photos of people who are sleeping in an unusual place, where they should never ever have to wake up and be on guard.)
The essay was written by Ibram X. Kendi, Director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. I had introduced his writings before here. My motivation for posting the entire essay today is simple: we cannot hear this truth often enough and clearly enough. Unless we understand the basic underlying causes for everything that we are experiencing now, unless we stop denying what is at the core of American history, our hope – and fight – for change will be doomed.
Denial Is the Heartbeat of America
When have Americans been willing to admit who we are?
“Let me be very clear: The scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not reflect a true America. Do not represent who we are,” President-elect Joe Biden said during Wednesday’s siege.
“The behavior we witnessed in the U.S. Capitol is entirely un-American,” read a statement from a bipartisan and bicameral group of elected officials that included Senators Joe Manchin, Susan Collins, Mitt Romney, and Mark Warner as well as Representatives Josh Gottheimer and Tom Reed.
“We’re the United States of America. We disagree on a lot of things, and we have a lot of spirited debate … But we talk it out, and we honor each other—even in our disagreement,” said Senator James Lankford, a Republican from Oklahoma. “And while we disagree on things—and disagree strongly at times—we do not encourage what happened today. Ever.”
“That’s not who we are,” Senator Ben Sasse said.
“This is not the America I know and love,” Representative Brenda Lawrence said.
“I know this is not our America,” Representative Ed Case said.
“This is not who we are,” Representative Nancy Mace said.
“This is how election results are disputed in a banana republic—not our democratic republic,” Republican former President George W. Bush said.“This is a national tragedy and is not who we are as a nation,” Democratic former President Jimmy Carter said.
Do these statements represent the American dream? Is the American dream the great delusion about what America is and who Americans are?
To say that the attack on the U.S. Capitol is not who we are is to say that this is not part of us, not part of our politics, not part of our history. And to say that this is not part of America, American politics, and American history is a bald-faced denial. But the denial is normal. In the aftermath of catastrophes, when have Americans commonly admitted who we are? The heartbeat of America is denial.
It is historic, this denial. Every American generation denies. America is establishing the freest democracy in the world, said the white people who secured their freedom during the 1770s and ’80s. America is the greatest democracy on Earth, said the property owners voting in the early 19th century. America is the beacon of democracy in world history, said the men who voted before the 1920s. America is the leading democracy in the world, said the non-incarcerated people who have voted throughout U.S. history in almost every state. America is the utmost democracy on the face of the Earth, said the primarily older and better-off and able-bodied people who are the likeliest to vote in the 21st century. America is the best democracy around, said the American people when it was harder for Black and Native and Latino people to vote in the 2020 election.
At every point in the history of American tyranny, the honest recorders heard the sounds of denial. Today is no different.
Americans remember and accept the enfranchising of citizens and peaceful transfers of power as their history, while forgetting and denying the coup plots, the attempted coups, and the successful coups. White terror is as American as the Stars and Stripes. But when this is denied, it is no wonder that the events at the Capitol are read as shocking and un-American.
In March 1783, Continental Army officers plotted mutiny against the Confederation Congress until George Washington convinced the officers to remain loyal. In 1861, pro-slavery insurrectionists assembled at the U.S. Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes for Abraham Lincoln. The Civil War came, lasting until 1865. White terrorists laid siege to the county courthouse in Colfax, Louisiana, on Easter Sunday 1873, and violently overthrew the local parish government, massacring roughly 150 Black people in the process. On September 14, 1874, the White League violently attempted to overthrow the newly elected governor of Louisiana in the Battle of Liberty Place, in New Orleans. White terrorists rioted; destroyed ballot boxes; and intimidated, wounded, and murdered Black voters in Alabama’s Barbour County on Election Day in 1874, securing victories for their candidates.
In 1898, white supremacists murdered dozens of Black people and violently overthrewthe democratically elected and interracial government of Wilmington, North Carolina. In 1921—in one of the most devastating economic coups in history—white supremacists murdered hundreds of Black residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and destroyedtheir prosperous Greenwood District, known affectionately as “Black Wall Street.” In 1933, financiers attempted to persuade President Franklin D. Roosevelt to hand overpower so they could establish a fascist government.
This is a small sampling—but are all the attempted and successful coups in American history not part of American history?
The denial runs through America like the Mississippi River system. I guess after Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia called for massive resistance to desegregating schools on February 25, 1956, those were not Americans who mobbed schoolchildren and college students from Little Rock, Arkansas, to Boston in subsequent decades. I guess those weren’t Americans who beat, jailed, and slaughtered the Americans waging the civil-rights, anti-war, Black-power, Brown-power, Red-power, Yellow-power, women’s-liberation, and gay-liberation movements from the 1950s to the 1980s. I guess their badges and Bibles and American flags weren’t American.
But distant history is one thing. Has American denial blinded Americans from seeing what has happened in their country over the past year in states across the land, on social-media apps across the internet?
Donald Trump has been attempting to incite coups since April 17, 2020, when he tweeted: “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!; LIBERATE MINNESOTA!; LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!” Armed and unarmed people gathered in state capitols in Michigan in April, Idaho in August, South Carolina in September, and Oregon in December over COVID-19 restrictions. And white terrorists plotted to kidnap the governors of Michigan and Virginia last year.
On January 6, 2021, as the siege occurred at the U.S. Capitol, officials in several states, including New Mexico, Georgia, and Colorado, evacuated state capitols to protect against the gathering mobs. The crowds, on that day, breached the gate to the grounds of the governor’s mansion in Washington State.
All of this evidence. All of this, and still some say these people are not part of America. Their antidemocratic politics are not part of American politics. The long history of coups is not part of American history. Denial is the heartbeat of America.
A 2018 music video shows Childish Gambino shirtless in an empty warehouse. Two gold chains hug his neck. An afro and thick facial hair hug his face. Gambino starts walk-dancing to a sweet-sounding folk melody. He comes upon a man, head covered, sitting in a chair. Gambino pulls out a handgun, assumes a comical stance evocative of a Jim Crow caricature, and shoots the man in the back of the head.
The gunshot transitions the sweet melody to a hard-thumping trap beat. As the man falls to the ground, Gambino faces the camera, holds the caricature pose, and raps, “This is America.”
A child appears holding a red cloth. Gambino carefully lays the weapon on the cloth, and dance-walks away, toward the camera. Two children carelessly drag the body away in the background as Gambino raps, “This is America.”
Don’t catch you slippin’ now Look at how I’m livin’ now Police be trippin’ now Yeah, this is America
After a while, the thumping transitions back to the melody. A robed Black church choir sings and sways. Gambino reappears, walk-dancing in glee, until someone tosses him an automatic weapon. He guns down the church members, in an unmistakable reference to the 2015 Charleston, South Carolina, church shooting.
The gunshots again transition the melody back to the thumping beat. Gambino raps, “This is America,” as the bodies are dragged away, as he delicately lays the rifle on a red cloth again, held again by a waiting child.
Is this America? Does America protect violence more than people? Is gun life America?
Were the Trump supporters violently occupying the U.S. Capitol America? Was all that violence, all that antidemocratic sentiment, who Americans partially are? Did more than 74 millionAmericans vote for Trump? Do 77 percent of those voters believe what he believes, what those insurrectionists who sacked the Capitol believe, against all evidence to the contrary: that the election was stolen from Trump and that he actually won? Is all that happened on January 6 part of America?
It is. They are. All of what we saw at the U.S. Capitol is part of America. But what’s also part of America is denying all of what is part of America. Actually, this denial is the essential part of America. Denial is the heartbeat of America.
Since 2018, when “This Is America” unpacked three words used to cloak persisting violence, I’ve been arguing that the heartbeat of racism is denial. There is the regular structural denial that racial inequity is caused by racist policy. And whenever an American engages in a racist act and someone points it out, the inevitable response is the sound of that denial: I’m not racist. It can’t be I was being racist, but I’m going to try to be anti-racist. It is always I’m not racist. No wonder the racist acts never stop.
What is the inevitable response of Americans to tragic stories of mass murder, of extreme destitution, of gross corruption, of dangerous injustice, of political chaos, of a raw attack on democracy within the very borders of the United States, as we witnessed at the U.S. Capitol? This is not who we are. From this bipartisan perspective, America is existentially nonviolent, prosperous, orderly, democratic, just, and exceptional. America is apparently not like those so-called banana republics, which are existentially violent, poor, chaotic, tyrannical, unjust, and inferior—as Republicans and Democrats keep implying. America is apparently not like those “shithole” countries, as Trump called them.
To overcome Trumpism, the American people must stop denying that Trumpism is outside America. Trump is the heartbeat of American denial in its clearest form. He is America, shirtless and exposed, like Childish Gambino in the video. Trump is not fundamentally different from those elected officials saying, “This is not who we are.” He denies. They deny. The difference is the extremism of Trump’s denial. While Americans commonly say, “I am not racist,” Trump says, “I am the least racist person there is anywhere in the world.” While Americans commonly say to those Trump supporters who attacked the Capitol, “You’re not us,” Trump says, “You’re very special.”
Trump’s political opponents rage about the red meat he keeps feeding his base while starving them of truth. But when Republicans and Democrats say, “This is not who we are,” whom are they speaking to? Are they speaking to swing voters? Do they believe that older white centrists can’t handle the truth? Are they starving them of the truth, too? Are they feeding white centrists the red meat of denial?
Two groups of Americans are feeding, and feeding on, American denial. There are Americans like Trump who nonviolently—and, like his supporters, violently—rage, and engage in the carnage at the U.S. Capitol in complete denial of the election results. And there are the Americans who during and after the carnage say, “This is not who we are,” in complete denial that the rioters are part of America.
The white domestic terrorist who denies his own criminality and the American politician who denies that the terrorist is part of us both remain in the foreground of the American media, of American politics—taking up all our care and concern. Meanwhile, in the background, the violence is placed on red cloths as the victims of the carnage are carelessly dragged out of sight and mind—as Eddie S. Glaude Jr. powerfully says, “This is us.”
In a fall 2020 survey, 54 percent of Americans said that their nation is the greatest in the world, with 80 percent of Republicans and 35 percent of Democrats expressing this sentiment. In January 2020, the majority of Americans said in a survey that the United States embodies the grandeur of gender equality, happiness, health consciousness, and public health. Nearly four in 10 Americans said that their nation promotes income equality.
But America’s actual standing in the world tells a different story on these issues and others. The life expectancy of Americans is shorter than for people in other rich countries that spend far less on health care. The U.S. has the highest maternal-mortality rate of any rich country. Police in the U.S. kill their fellow citizens at significantly higher rates than in any other rich country. The United States has the largest incarcerated population per capita in the world. The rate of gun violence here is significantly higher than in any other wealthy nation. Only Israel has a higher rate of poverty among rich countries than the United States. Among G7 nations, the United States has the highest rate of income inequality. The U.S. ranks second only to Greenland in the highest rate of suicides by firearm, and most of those suicides are by white men.
This is America, just like the insurrection in the Capitol was America. We need to see this reality with clear eyes, because nothing has held back America more than its denial. Nothing has caused more human carnage than American denial.
If you can look at the carnage and respond That’s not us, then you’ll consider it to be an anomaly. Humans—like nations—are not going to perform radical surgery on cancers that they don’t think are part of them. Instead of seeing white supremacists as the greatest domestic-terror threat of our time, too many see them as marginal actors. Thus, the marginal response to the carnage. Thus, the carnage continues.
Police violence—instead of being seen as the unnecessary killing of three Americans every single day—is dismissed as the product of bad apples. Thus, the marginal response to Breonna Taylor’s and George Floyd’s killings. Thus, the carnage continues. Voter suppression—instead of being seen as corroding American electoral politics—is dismissed as a rogue GOP operation. Thus, the marginal response to electoral carnage. Thus, the carnage continues.
Economic inequality and mass poverty—instead of being seen as the inevitable results of racial capitalism—are dismissed as glitches in the economy. Thus, the marginal response to economic carnage. Thus, the carnage continues. Sexism, racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism—instead of being seen as systemic and pervasive—are dismissed as being carried out only by those individual red hats and rednecks. Thus, the marginal response to the carnage. Thus, the carnage continues. And on and on, with climate change and pipelines and transphobia and assault rifles and #MeToo. And on and on, the carnage continues.
We must stop the heartbeat of denial and revive America to the thumping beat of truth. The carnage has no chance of stopping until the denial stops. This is not who we are must become, in the aftermath of the attack on the U.S. Capitol: This is precisely who we are. And we are ashamed. And we are aggrieved at what we’ve done, at how we let this happen. But we will change. We will hold the perpetrators accountable. We will change policy and practices.We will radically root out this problem. It will be painful. But without pain there is no healing.
And in the end, what will make America true is the willingness of the American people to stare at their national face for the first time, to open the book of their history for the first time, and see themselves for themselves—all the political viciousness, all the political beauty—and finally right the wrongs, or spend the rest of the life of America trying.
There was, however no agreement on how to categorize me….
although the world seemed to understand that I thrive on learning about things:
And then there was mystery,
tapping right into my thoughts – how do we understand what something means? A quest that is particularly tricky for someone who learns a new language, as I did with English? How do you deal with a vocabulary where things mean the same thing even if they are pronounced or spelled (farther/further) differently, or, worse, where things can mean opposites, in one and the same word?
Can you generate some of those contronyms, also known as Janus words, like the double-faced Roman God who stood over entries and exits of the Roman Empire?
Oversight: you can have it all in plain view, or you may have missed to spot something.
To cleave: something adheres to something else closely, or is cut off violently with a cleaver.
To dust: taking the dust away with a cloth or duster, or sprinkle it onto a surface, like powdered sugar or snow or other light substances.
To sanction – allowing something, or penalizing something.
To drop – you might drop something from your speech or from your life, but you also might drop a new album, adding rather something than letting go.
To peruse – originally it meant to pay detailed, specific attention to what you read, but it now also means to just skim over.
You get the idea. Usually we have no trouble whatsoever to discern which meaning of the word is intended, it all depends on the context and we are usually aware of that. Oversight committee, for example, is never mistaken to mean it is the congressional body instructed to make mistakes. Context rules.
But think of words that develop in spoken language outside your usual realm, amongst younger people for example. We are probably all of the generation that understood that cool can mean cool or can mean hot. “That’s a hot blogger! Yeah, she’s cool!”
I did a double take, though, when I started to hear the word sick bandied about, which turned out to mean really good. If you are not around those who develop new meanings, it’s hard even if you hear stuff in the right context.
Oh well, she
and
(s,) referring to the closing of her rain jacket, not to shutting her mouth or to the amount of insight gained. Had to keep the list of 75 contronyms dry.
Photographs from a single walk around the esplanade at the Willamette river last week.
